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Photo club focuses on Arctic images

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If you’ve ever imagined grabbing your camera and heading off to photograph remote parts of the northern hemisphere, the Northwest Passage, Iceland or the remote Islands off of the shores of Scotland, the central Alberta photo club has a presentation you need to see.
Adventure Canada will share their experience photographing in Canada’s north and its coastlines. The company hosts tours on smaller cruise ships bringing photographers to shore via zodiacs.

“The club brings in different speakers to please the variety of individual needs of its members,” says Scotty Roxburgh, the club’s president, adding, “and we like to stimulate each level of photographer to move outside of their individual comfort zone.”

“Adventure Canada provides a variety of experts on their cruises to educate individuals about the remote areas they visit, professional photographers along with historians, marine biologists, culturalists, archaeologist, authors, artists,” Roxburgh said. He thinks the cruise will interest more than just the club members, so tickets for the March 3 presentations at Golden Circle event will also be available to the public at the door or online at http://centralalbertaphotographicsociety.com .

Dr, Scott Forsyth, is an expert landscape photographer and he’ll share how he creates images, demonstrate setting up and photographing in remote areas, discuss composition, available light and post processing to achieve great images. The session runs from 2 until 5 pm Saturday returning at 7 pm with David Newland sharing his experiences of travelling the Northwest Passage through his Story and Song, a musical and spoken-word performance of original songs, along with photographs, inspired by the sights and sounds of the Canadian Arctic.

Roxburgh’s club, the Central Alberta Photographic Society, goes by its acronym nickname, CAPS, and is having a banner year, providing and organizing compelling presenters and interesting and rewarding outings. Membership includes beginners and experts and all levels in between, all enthusiastic about capturing images of great experiences. Think snowy owls. X-country ski championships. Beautiful Alberta landscapes. Ice bubbles at Lake Abraham.

As members get comfortable with their cameras, getting that great shot gets more compelling; the opportunities to take interesting photos keep expanding and they get together for some really enjoyable and instructive activity. Often outside, in fresh air.

Last month, more than a dozen members of the club covered the 2018 Haywood Noram/Peavy Mart Western Canadian Championships at Riverbend, taking thousands of images and providing organizers and athletes with a collection of more than 3,000 moments captured. Roxburgh says he’s pleased with how well the membership gels socially this year with good attendance and lots of enthusiastic participation.

Details of the Adventure Canada and Northwest Passage in Story, Song and Photograph are available at http://centralalbertaphotographicsociety.com

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Community

SPARC Red Deer – Caring Adult Nominations open now!

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Red Deer community let’s give a round of applause to the incredible adults shaping the future of our kids. Whether they’re a coach, neighbour, teacher, mentor, instructor, or someone special, we want to know about them!

Tell us the inspiring story of how your nominee is helping kids grow up great. We will honour the first 100 local nominees for their outstanding contributions to youth development. It’s time to highlight those who consistently go above and beyond!

To nominate, visit Events (sparcreddeer.ca)

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Addictions

‘Harm Reduction’ is killing B.C.’s addicts. There’s got to be a better way

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioid drug overdoses — almost as many as died during the Second World War.
Governments, health care professionals and addiction experts all acknowledge that widespread use of opioids has created a public health crisis in Canada. Yet they agree on virtually nothing else about this crisis, including its causes, possible remedies and whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents.

Fuelled by the deadly manufactured opioid fentanyl, Canada’s national drug overdose rate stood at 19.3 people per 100,000 in 2022, a shockingly high number when compared to the European Union’s rate of just 1.8. But national statistics hide considerable geographic variation. British Columbia and Alberta together account for only a quarter of Canada’s population yet nearly half of all opioid deaths. B.C.’s 2022 death rate of 45.2/100,000 is more than double the national average, with Alberta close behind at 33.3/100,00.

In response to the drug crisis, Canada’s two western-most provinces have taken markedly divergent approaches, and in doing so have created a natural experiment with national implications.

B.C. has emphasized harm reduction, which seeks to eliminate the damaging effects of illicit drugs without actually removing them from the equation. The strategy focuses on creating access to clean drugs and includes such measures as “safe” injection sites, needle exchange programs, crack-pipe giveaways and even drug-dispensing vending machines. The approach goes so far as to distribute drugs like heroin and cocaine free of charge in the hope addicts will no longer be tempted by potentially tainted street drugs and may eventually seek help.

But safe-supply policies create many unexpected consequences. A National Post investigation found, for example, that government-supplied hydromorphone pills handed out to addicts in Vancouver are often re-sold on the street to other addicts. The sellers then use the money to purchase a street drug that provides a better high — namely, fentanyl.

Doubling down on safe supply, B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy — though for now that effort has been stymied by the courts.

According to Vancouver city councillor Brian Montague, “The stats tell us that harm reduction isn’t working.” In an interview, he calls decriminalization “a disaster” and proposes a policy shift that recognizes the connection between mental illness and addiction. The province, he says, needs “massive numbers of beds in treatment facilities that deal with both addictions and long-term mental health problems (plus) access to free counselling and housing.”

In fact, Montague’s wish is coming true — one province east, in Alberta. Since the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, Alberta has been transforming its drug addiction policy away from harm reduction and towards publicly-funded treatment and recovery efforts.

Instead of offering safe-injection sites and free drugs, Alberta is building a network of 10 therapeutic communities across the province where patients can stay for up to a year, receiving therapy and medical treatment and developing skills that will enable them to build a life outside the drug culture. All for free. The province’s first two new recovery centres opened last year in Lethbridge and Red Deer. There are currently over 29,000 addiction treatment spaces in the province.

This treatment-based strategy is in large part the work of Marshall Smith, current chief of staff to Alberta’s premier and a former addict himself, whose life story is a testament to the importance of treatment and recovery.

The sharply contrasting policies of B.C. and Alberta allow a comparison of what works and what doesn’t. A first, tentative report card on this natural experiment was produced last year in a study from Stanford University’s network on addiction policy (SNAP). Noting “a lack of policy innovation in B.C.,” where harm reduction has become the dominant policy approach, the report argues that in fact “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” But it concludes that “Canada overall, and B.C. in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”

The report is admittedly an early analysis of these two contrasting approaches. Most of Alberta’s recovery homes are still under construction, and B.C.’s decriminalization policy is only a year old. And since the report was published, opioid death rates have inched higher in both provinces.

Still, the early returns do seem to favour Alberta’s approach. That should be regarded as good news. Society certainly has an obligation to try to help drug users. But that duty must involve more than offering addicts free drugs. Addicted people need treatment so they can kick their potentially deadly habit and go on to live healthy, meaningful lives. Dignity comes from a life of purpose and self-control, not a government-funded fix.

Susan Martinuk is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the 2021 book Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health Care Crisis. A longer version of this article recently appeared at C2CJournal.ca.

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